Three Basic Principles of Worship
I have three points for you today about worship, and I base all three points in the Scriptures, so we will look at a number of scriptures as we go through the sermon.
1. My first point is that God does want us to worship him. This is a constant we see from one end of Scripture to another, from Cain and Abel in Genesis 3 to the new heavens and new earth, in the last chapter of Revelation.
Jesus made this point in John 4, and I'd like for us to turn there, because what he said is such a foundational passage for our understanding of worship in the New Testament. And it is especially interesting that Jesus said all this to a Samaritan woman, a person who was excluded from the Jewish forms of worship.
21 Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. [location is not important. One of the focus points of old covenant worship is simply not important under the new covenant.]
22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.
23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. [God seeks worshippers, and he wants people who worship him, and he wants them to worship not according to superficial things like location of temple, but on something more important, and that is our attitude. Our worship must be sincere, done in the right spirit, not in pretense.]
Verse 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth."
So this is one of the New Testament's most important statements about worship. We see another in 1 Peter 2, in a passage that talks about who we are as God's people. We'll just break into the passage in verse 9, in 1 Peter 2 verse 9, and we will see in this familiar verse a little section that we didn't give much attention to in the past.
1 Peter 2, verse 9: you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.
So, we are called by God for the purpose of declaring his praises. That's our purpose statement, in a way. We are called to praise God, to give him glory, to testify to how great he is. That is why we are called.
Now, another way to phrase my first point is that we are to worship only God. We cannot worship Baal and God, or Mammon and God, or soccer and God, or anything else and God. Our worship is to be exclusive, because God should have our undivided allegiance. Anything less than that does not give him glory, but takes something away from him as if he were not enough.
Here, I'd like to turn to Isaiah 45. This is one of the great passages of monotheism, the belief that there is only one God. Isaiah puts it in such clear and unmistakable terms. Isaiah 45, verse 5: "I am the LORD, and there is no other; apart from me there is no God."
Verse 21, second half: "There is no God apart from me, a righteous God and a Savior; there is none but me."
Chapter 46, verse 9: "I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me." God looks around heaven and says, there is nobody like me. I am the only God there is. There is no committee of divine beings in heaven -- there is only one.
It's not like there is God the Father over here and God the Son over there, and God is saying that there is nobody like us. No, he says, there is nobody like me. There is no God but me, singular. There is only one God, only one Savior. That's what he says in Isaiah 43, verse 11: "I, even I, am the LORD, Jehovah, and apart from me there is no savior."
God looks around and he doesn't see any other Gods, any other Saviors. He's the only one there is. There is only one Lord and Savior.
Now, of course, we recognize Jesus as our Lord and Savior. But in doing this, we do not recognize him as another Savior. We recognize him as the only Savior there is, as the Lord who spoke through the prophet Isaiah. He's the only Savior who exists.
The Lord who spoke through Isaiah is the same being the New Testament knows as Jesus Christ. There is only one Savior, and he is it. It's not like God the Father looks around heaven and says that I'm a Savior but Jesus my Son is not. No, he says that there is no Savior apart from me, and Jesus my Son is not apart from me. He is a Savior just as much as I am, but he is not another Savior, but the same one. We are one being, not two. We are fundamentally the same being. We are one.
Jesus is our Lord and Savior not because he is an addition to the true God, but because he is an expression of the true God.
And whatever honor we give Jesus, we simultaneously give to God the Father as well. John 5:22-23:
Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son,
23 that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.
In the Bible, no one is ever criticized for giving Jesus too much honor. That is because we are encouraged to give Jesus just as much honor as we give the Father, and we honor God when we honor his Son. We praise the Father when we praise the Son, because they are one being, one as Lord and one as Savior.
We do not worship Jesus in addition to the true God, but as an expression of the true God, as a personal expression of the true God, as one of the persons of God's being.
So we see in Philippians 2:10 that, whereas in the Old Testament people were told that everyone would bow to the Lord Yahweh, in the New Testament we are to give those same honors to Jesus Christ. Philippians 2, verses 9-11:
Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
So we see Paul here taking an Old Testament scripture about God, and applying it to Jesus Christ, and the reason that this is a legitimate use of Scripture is because Jesus Christ is an expression of God. He is the Word made flesh, part of God's being made flesh, and we give him all glory and honor, and when we do that, we simultaneously give glory to God the Father.
God the Father and God the Son are not beings in competition with each other, as if one will be insulted when we honor the other. No, they are one, one being, and when we give glory and honor to the Son, we also give glory and honor to the Father, because they are one in being, one Savior, one Lord, and one God.
We see an example of that equality of glory and honor in Revelation 5, where Jesus and the Father are given equal worship.
12 In a loud voice they sang: "Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and praise!" [Here Jesus is being praised in the same words, and even more, that were used in chapter 4 for God the Father. Revelation repeatedly gives Jesus the same titles that it gives the Father.]
13 Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing: "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power, for ever and ever!"
Here Jesus is being praised in the same breath and in the same words as God the Father. They are worthy of equal praise, equal obedience, and equal worship, because they are equal, because they are one in essence and being. They are just different expressions of the same being, expressions that are distinct in identity, yet one in being.
We do not have two Saviors, but only one. We do not have two Lords, but only one. Jesus is our Lord and Savior because God is our Lord and Savior, and Jesus is an expression of God. We do not have two Gods, or even three Gods, but only one, because the Father and the Son are one being, two expressions of the one God Being.
Well, that's enough on that point for now. Our subject is worship, and we need to realize that we should worship only God, and because of that we need to understand how worship of Jesus fits into the picture. We worship Jesus because Jesus is God. He is one person in the divine being.
The main point is that only God is to be worshipped. Worship, to be acceptable, must be exclusive. God requires all our love, all our allegiance. We cannot serve two Gods.
In ancient Israel, the rival God was often Baal. In Jesus' day, it was religious tradition, self-righteousness and hypocrisy. Actually, anything that comes between us and God -- anything that might cause us to disobey him -- is a false god, an idol. For some today, it is money. For others, it is sex. Some have a bigger problem with pride, or with concerns about what other people may think of us.
No matter what our weakness is, we need to crucify it, to kill it, to put all false gods away. If something prevents us from obeying God, we need to get rid of it. God wants people who worship only him.
He wants us to worship him, and since he is love and wants what is best for us, we conclude that it is good for us to worship God, and worship him alone. This is what we were made for, this is what we were called for, and this is what we will find most satisfying in the long run.
God does not assign us an unpleasant chore just so that he gets praise. No, he wants us to worship because this is the way that we will have the most fulfilling life, the most satisfying, the most happy, the most joyful way of living.
2. My second point is that God doesn't specify much about how we are to worship him. Now, we know that he said a lot about specifics in the old covenant. Specific people were assigned to do specific actions at specific times in specific places. The who, what, when, where and how were spelled out. In contrast to that, we see in Genesis very few rules about how the patriarchs worshipped. They did not have a designated priesthood, were not restricted to a certain place, and were told little about what to offer or when to offer it. They just worshipped in their own style and manner.
In the New Testament, we again see very little about the how and the when of worship. Worship activities are not restricted to a certain group of people or a certain place. Christ did away with Mosaic requirements and restrictions -- they were temporary regulations, assigned until Christ came, as it says in Galatians 3. Now, all believers are priests and continually offer themselves as living sacrifices.
However, although we may worship God in different styles, we still have specific acts of worship. There are things that we do to worship God.
3. Sincerity
Worship must be sincere, not a pretense of actions. God wants all of us – heart, mind and soul.
Matthew 6, verse 24. "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon."
how does a person serve Mammon? Do we bow down before it and take care of its needs? Is money a weak and needy god that needs the help of strong and powerful us?
No — it's exactly the opposite. We serve money when we think it will take care of our needs. We serve money when we think it has the power to help us with our weaknesses. We serve money when we think it has power. We serve money when we are devoted to it, when we spend our time trying to acquire its power. We are praising it by our actions, by the amount of time we devote to it. We look to it as the real help that we need.
So when it comes to worship, the word serve has the opposite sense than it usually does. We serve money if we look to it to take care of our needs.
In the same way, we do not serve God because he needs our help. We do not serve him because we have the power to help him. Rather, we serve God by looking to him for the help that we need. We serve him and praise him when we see him as the power to help us in our real needs, when we spend time looking to him. That shows he has value, that he is valuable to us, that we treasure him.
Our desires are a measure of our worship. Do we desire God more than anything? Do we desire to do his will? Do we desire to spend time with him? This is how we serve and worship a God who does not need our help, does not need our service, does not need anything.
We serve him by admitting that he does not need anything, that we are the ones who have needs, and he is the one who can take care of them in a way that nothing else can. We look to him, not to money, for power and help. We are devoted to him, committed to him.
He is the treasure that we seek, our all in all. He fills our thirst, our hunger, our emotional needs, and when we look to him for these things, it gives him glory. When we are satisfied in him, we are giving him glory.